NASA Brings 'Big Data' to the Cloud

Date: 11/12/2013Category: Mission News & Science
By: Eve Halligan

NASA Brings Earth Science 'Big Data' to the CloudClimate change projections for the United States, such as the data shown in the image of average springtime temperature changes by the 2090s, will be available on the cloud through an agreement with Amazon Web Services. This data was produced by the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX), a research platform of the NASA Advanced Supercomputer Facility at the agency's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.NASA and Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) of Seattle, Wash., are making a large collection of NASA climate and Earth science satellite data available to research and educational users through the AWS cloud. The system enhances research and educational opportunities for the U.S. geoscience community by promoting community-driven research, innovation and collaboration.

This agreement allows NASA and AWS to experiment with a new way to provide data services. By using the cloud, research and application users worldwide gain access to an integrated Earth science computational and data management system they can use on their own. The service encompasses selected NASA satellite and global change data sets -- including temperature, precipitation, and forest cover -- and data processing tools from the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX), a research platform of the NASA Advanced Supercomputer Facility at the agency's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. NASA climate data sets provided to AWS will continue to be available to the public in a full and open manner. The effort continues NASA's adoption of cloud platforms to enhance digital services, enabling NASA to make more U.S. government data easy to find and access without having to download large amounts of data.